Re: FREE GAME: Diggles

On Fri, 15 Nov 2024 16:03:31 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

* Diggles: The Myth of Fenris
https://www.gog.com/en/game/diggles_the_myth_of_fenris

"Mine." I doubt I will play it, but hey it got decent ratings and my genre.

"Diggles" is very much a late-90s/early 2000s era game ("Diggles" was
originally released in 2001). There were a bunch of similar titles
released around that era, that all seemed a mix of "Settlers" and
"Lemmings" and "Tamagatchi". They were all very tongue-in-cheek in
setting and mood. Games like "Sheep" or "Baldies" or "Constructors"
or... gog, I can't even remember them all, they were so forgettable.
Just a weird mix of strategy and action, seemingly selling more on
their off-beat nature than any real quality of gameplay. I bought way
too many of these sort of games, and I don't think I would be off by
very much if I said I was disappointed by them all.

Every now and again one of these games -like "Diggles" pops up again
and I'm reminded of the genre. But that's usually the only time I
remember they even exist. Even if some of them weren't terrible, none
of them were great and they're generally forgotten for a reason.

That said, it does reflect the tremendous change going on in video
games in that era, as -with so much raw horsepower and memory suddenly
available to developers- all sorts of new ideas were tossed about.
Sometimes the ideas were good ones; more often they weren't. But
developers were much more willing to take risks back then, even the
ones associated with big-name publishers.

Nowadays, most games -even amongst the Indies- are just clones of
existing titles. Sometimes this is because it's just financially
prudent, but other times it is because... well, I think it's that a
lot of the ideas have already been tried. It's not that it's
impossible to think up anything new, but it's a lot harder not to walk
in the footsteps of somebody else. The industry is a lot more crowded
now.